The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy

The conflict between science and religion promoted by secular intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens is a smokescreen. Behind it, a far more important argument about global power and justice in a post-postmodern age is becoming unavoidable, argues Tina Beattie.

20 - 12 - 2007

The Economist recently published a colour supplement titled "In God's Name: A Special Report on Religion and Public Life" (3 November 2007). The accompanying leading article included a rueful admission: "The Economist was so confident of the Almighty's demise that we published His obituary in our millennium issue." There is an almost palpable sense of discomfort at a leading international journal finding itself confronted with the unexpected resurgence of religion as a newsworthy topic which merits serious debate.

Tina Beattie is reader in Christian studies, Roehampton University, England. Among her books are God's Mother, Eve's Advocate (Allen & Unwin, 2002) and New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (Routledge 2005). Her website is here

Tina Beattie's latest book is The New Atheists (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007)

Also by Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

"Pope Benedict XVI and Islam: beyond words" (17 September 2006)

"Veiling the issues: a distractive debate" (24 October 2006)

"Religion in Britain in the Blair era" (10 January 2007)

"Religion's cutting edge: lessons from Africa" (14 February 2007)As the article points out, much of this can be attributed to the upsurge in various forms of religious extremism during the last thirty years, and the recent atheist backlash by bestselling authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. If we are to understand this phenomenon and its social and political implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist extremists. We need to explore some of the complex underlying reasons for the persistence of religion after a century in which it more or less disappeared from view in western politics and public life, and was banished by totalitarian communist regimes.

The wrong argument

We might begin by recognising that the concept of religion is misleading, so that our discussions become mired in misrepresentations and over-simplifications. Our modern understanding of religion is informed by a post-Enlightenment approach in which science, reason and progress have replaced religion as the organising focus of western life, but the word "religion" also has connotations associated with 19th-century western imperialism. The word derives from the Latin religio. It has had different meanings through Roman and then Christian history, but it acquired its present meaning during the quest for objective, scientific knowledge and colonial conquest which together shaped modern British history.

During the Victorian era, new "sciences" such as anthropology and ethnology developed in order to study the "primitive" peoples and societies whom Europe's empire-builders encountered in their travels. Enthusiasm for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution meant that the study of religion came into being as a way of ranking and studying other cultures in comparison to the defining norm of western civilisation, by scholars who believed that the white western male stood on the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder. The word "science" also changed its meaning during the 19th century, from a generic word used to describe all forms of knowledge including theology and philosophy, to one more narrowly focused on an objective, rationalist approach to knowledge based on empirical evidence alone. That is why the nature of the current confrontation between "science" and "religion" is so problematic, because we are dealing with two slippery concepts which come freighted with a deeply ambivalent historical legacy.

The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values. But just as this "war" masked a much more amicable and creative dialogue between scientists and theologians in a society which was still largely Christian in its beliefs, so today the attempt to portray the relationship between science and religion as one of irreconcilable conflict is a distortion of a more pluralist intellectual and religious environment.

Many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith, and some argue that quantum physics challenges any attempt to maintain a strict distinction between scientific and philosophical or theological knowledge. Some scientists - such as the head of the human-genome project, Francis S Collins - have converted from atheism to Christianity as a result of their scientific research. Many members of the scientific community have sought to distance themselves from the self-publicising polemics of Richard Dawkins and his fellow "new atheists", for they see the fact that Dawkins in particular has become so dogmatic and ideologically driven in his militant atheism as a betrayal of the very scientific values which he claims to represent.

The attempt to stage a war between religion and science - whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists - is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in. If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate - in Britain and the United States especially - concerning the role of religion in society.

With regard to debates about Islam, we must recognise how the portrayal of Muslims as violent fundamentalists still resonates with those 19th-century beliefs that white westerners are inherently superior to their savage and barbaric counterparts in other cultures and religions. Also lurking within the media treatment of religion today is a masked anti-Catholicism, for that too has been a feature of modern societies such as Britain and America whose values have been largely shaped by Protestantism. Unless we are attentive to these subtexts, our discussions about religion risk being vehicles for unacknowledged prejudices and historical animosities which can only serve to fuel conflict in these uncertain times.

The limits of rationalism

One way to understand the current crisis in values and beliefs is to situate it in the context of late modernity or postmodernity, when the democratic and scientific values which emerged in the various intellectual and political revolutions of the 18th century are disintegrating. Today, we face a world of complexity and plurality which some find exhilarating in its freedoms and opportunities, but others find terrifying in its lack of certainties and truths.

The term "postmodernism" is associated with Jean-François Lyotard's book, The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979, but the era of postmodernity had its genesis in the aftermath of the second world war, when all the values which had sustained modern western societies for two centuries were in meltdown. How could visions of progress and the civilising power of reason survive two world wars and the Nazi genocide? How could science provide answers to human suffering, when it had provided us with such a devastating capacity for destruction and killing?

This uncertainty has increased as the full implications of the 20th century have dawned upon us. Never in human history did so many people slaughter one another in the name of so many ideologies and visions of progress, all of them informed by a post-religious secular ideology - whether it was the quasi-paganism of Nazism or the atheism of the Soviet Union, China or Cambodia. If the Enlightenment signified the liberation of western societies from the tyranny of religion and theocratic rule, we discovered in the 20th century that the cruelty of God-fearing societies might be rivalled only by that of godless societies.

Although the new atheists are dogmatic in their refusal to accept that line of argument, it remains the context in which we must situate our reflections on the crises confronting us at the beginning of the 21st century. Those with greater historical sensitivity and philosophical insight than Dawkins know that the gulags, Hiroshima and the gas-chambers have cast a pall over western memory and consciousness, and we are right to distrust the forms of knowledge and the political systems in which such violence was able to take root and grow.

Contrary to what many people hoped, scientific rationalism did not deliver us from the evils of violence, war and hatred, nor did religion wither and die in the glare of the scientific gaze. Instead, religion has revived in virulent new forms which are parasitic upon modernity, for religious extremism is informed by the same ahistorical and literalistic understanding of truth which informs scientific approaches to knowledge, with their shared resistance to ambiguity, doubt and complexity in the quest for meaning. In both cases, the poetic and holistic wisdom of past generations - much of it embedded in religious traditions - is set aside in favour of an aggressive and one-sided dogmatism which ruptures the fabric of human life in its communal and creative dimensions.

But if modernity created the conditions in which religious and scientific fundamentalisms took root, it is postmodernity which has created the kind of volatile social environment in which these opposing forces encounter one another with potentially explosive violence. While postmodernism destabilises all claims to truth and creates a widespread mood of doubt and scepticism, it also creates a cultural vacuum in which every form of extremism and identity politics can flourish, while sapping us of the collective vision and energy needed to challenge corrupt and unjust political structures.

One of the great myths of postmodernism is its celebration of the death of the "meta-narrative", its paradoxical claim that the only universal truth is that there is no universal truth. But this is a lie, for never has humankind been so dominated by a single meta-narrative as it is today, when global capitalism threatens to eliminate every other narrative and every other meaning from human life. While the histories and traditions which have bound people together and conferred upon communities a sense of meaning and belonging are under siege from all directions, a relentless and inhumane system of global economics is sweeping away the last vestiges of human dignity and hope for those who are exiled, exploited and commodified by the wars, corruptions and burgeoning inequalities which our economic system brings in its wake. This is the context in which we must situate our reflections if we want to ask why so many people are attracted to rigid and dogmatic forms of religion.

A fury for certitude

Mark Juergensmeyer, in his fine study of religious violence, Terror in the Mind of God (2001), argues that religion is rarely in itself a cause of war and violence, but it can provide a potent moral justification for violence as a form of resistance to perceived injustices and inequalities. Thus the current phenomenon of religious extremism must be understood in the context of the widespread failure of secularism and the modern nation state in their inability to challenge deprivation and injustice. Faced with the combined forces of western military and economic power, disenfranchised and alienated groups begin to see the West as the primary source of global injustice and moral corruption.

Also in openDemocracy on Europe's struggles with and over faith

Patrick Weil, "A nation in diversity: France, Muslims and the headscarf" (25 March 2004)

Gilles Kepel, "Europe's answer to Londonistan" (24 August 2005)

Tariq Modood, "Remaking multiculturalism after 7/7" (29 September 2005)

openDemocracy, "Muslims and Europe: a cartoon confrontation" (6 February 2006) - a symposium

Roger Scruton, "The great hole of history" (11 September 2006)

Michael Walsh, "The Regensburg address: reason amid certainty" (20 September 2006)

Faisal Devji, "Between Pope and Prophet" (26 September 2006)

Ehsan Masood, "British Muslims: ends and beginnings" (31 October 2006)

Faisal Devji, "Epistles of moderation" (18 October 2007)

Olivier Roy, "Secularism confronts Islam" (25 October 2007)

From this perspective, religious zealotry can be interpreted as the other face of the metropolitan fancy-dress parade which constitutes the consumerist lifestyles of postmodern urban elites, reflecting as they do the banality and homogeneity of a global market which is no respecter of boundaries, cultures and traditions. Instead of freedom we have choice, and instead of values we have labels and lifestyles. We citizens of the western democracies have become solipsistic consumers indifferent to the squandering of our hard-won freedoms and rights by governments for which terrorism has become a byword for ever-more draconian strategies of surveillance and control.

As democracy withers and the political forum is colonised by the suave-speaking mediocrities of the soundbite era, as blatant self-interest on the part of the world's most powerful nations becomes an excuse for every kind of collusion in the politics of corruption and violence, we in whose names the battles are being fought have allowed our horizons to shrink so that we see no further than the nearest shopping-mall. And we are the privileged ones, the citizens whose security merits any injustice, any violation of human rights, against the immigrants, fanatics and foreigners who threaten our vacuous existence. Should we be surprised that some of them are declaring war on us?

For many others, it is religion - particularly in its more dogmatic forms - that offers a potent alternative; those drawn to it include people both disenfranchised from the beginning because they are too poor or too oppressed to participate in the postmodern shop-fest, and people who are afraid of what they perceive as the moral meltdown of modern western culture. In these forms of religion, people can find certainty instead of confusion, clear rules instead of ambiguity, tight-knit communities instead of shifting and transient relationships; and all this is presided over by a wrathful male God who hates all the things they hate - particularly gays, feminists and libertarians of every description - and who sanctions violence in order to keep His values safe from corruption.

What vision of democracy?

On 9/11, the postmodern condition met its nemesis. When Osama bin Laden's suicidal supporters selected their targets, they were selecting symbols which represent the west's economic, military and political hegemony with all its corrupted values and degenerate politics. Living as we do in the swirl of history which followed that event, we lack the critical distance to assess its impact and evaluate its consequences. However, the shift in western attitudes from the laissez-faire pluralism of postmodernity to the more hard-edged antagonism of cultural commentators such as Dawkins, AC Grayling, Polly Toynbee and other guardians of secular truth has to be understood in that context.

If sufficient critical distance is not possible, it is possible to say that since 9/11 we have gone beyond the postmodern condition; and that what we do next will determine whether we discover in our new circumstances the abyss of a violent nihilism and war without end, or the beginnings of a new and hopeful flourishing among peoples in harmony with our natural environment, which is our only hope of redemption. The latter would require that we recognise the awesome responsibilities which come with our much vaunted values of freedom, democracy and human rights. In the era of war without end in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the contrast between the protests of the public and the indifference of its leaders (as after the huge worldwide demonstrations of February 2003) is a stark expression of how these values are routinely traduced.

The most pressing question confronting us lies here: how to respond to the slow death of democracy. The recent confrontation between religion and science is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide behind a convenient and inflated - where not fabricated - myth of religious extremism which masks from us our own complicity in the murder and mayhem by which western global supremacy and our own privileged status within that are now maintained.

The Buddhist monks of Burma have shown us that religion is not always the enemy of freedom. Sometimes it can inspire very great acts of courage in the name of democracy and human rights. If religions have too often sanctioned killing in the name of God, they also have the capacity to instil in their followers the understanding that sometimes, there are values worth dying for. Let us listen to the silence of those - for now - defeated monks. In our noisy and increasingly violent defence of freedom, we must ask ourselves what vision of democracy inspired them to protest in peace and to die in hope. I think it was Martin Luther King who asked: "If there is nothing you are willing to die for, is there anything you have that's worth living for?" The postmodern condition gave us nothing to die for and nothing to live for, but it seems to have given us a great deal we are willing to kill for.

Average rating

(16 votes)

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/trackback/35456

read on

Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007)

This article is published by Tina Beattie, , and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

steven_12 said:

Thu, 2007-12-20 20:23

This is a completely worthless article.

ShawnC said:

Thu, 2007-12-20 21:39

Tina makes a great point. She just takes a little long to get there. Looking at it from a demographics perspective, it's only a matter time before the emerging Muslim population in Europe overtakes the declining population of what scholars are calling "Old Europe." In other words, the current atheist regime is just going to die out after a while. Her poke at "God-fearing" societies is totally out of line. If people who say they revere the teachings of Jesus (as do Muslims and Christians alike) would act like he prescribed, war would be next to nonexistent among these nations. It's not God's problem that men kill each other--they bear the responsibility for their own actions. Shawn

www.emergentislam.blogspot.com

Dilip Simeon said:

Fri, 2007-12-21 10:31

This is a timely and thought-provoking essay. Metaphysicians of virtuous murder may take their sustenance from 'secular' historicist as well as theological dogma. Camus made this point forcefully in The Rebel. However I dont share the author's enthusiasm for Juergensmeyer's book, despite its careful research. For one, it doesn't care to define 'terror', and leaves out the actions that resulted in the demolition of India's Babri Mosque in 1992, on the specious ground that they 'appeared' spontaneous. He also cites the US promotion of ‘secular governments' as a reason for attracting the hostility of fundamentalists. This is a historically ill-informed assessment, to say the least. I have a review of Juergensmeyer at the following link: http://www.amanpanchayat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=108 That apart, I appreciate the brunt of Ms Beattie's argument. Dilip

Felix Cohen said:

Fri, 2007-12-21 10:42

...but, I feel, full of dangerous simplifications to make her point. It is easy to demonise the vanguard of the new godless; Dawkins has made a strawman of himself, and it is to the movements great detriment that he has become so ridiculous.

However, his pomposity and delusions of grandeur are easily matched by some other religious figures, including a pope who is so ridiculous and distanced from his people as to believe that faith and abstinence are a more effective and likely prophylactic than condoms, or misogynist islam clerics.

Yes, there are ridiculous advocates of science, just as there are of religion. The important distinction remains, however, of the scientists being prepared to question their own beliefs, and for the overall corpus of scientific knowledge to advace and change, which would be anathema to any religious movement.

It is also dangerous to conflate the political goals of the Burmese monks with lazy Judeo-christian moralising. The monks have been forced to make their stand by the actions of a callous junta. I shall not lower myself to Tina Beattie's invokation of Godwins law, but the Catholic church hardly has a history of defiance against totalitarianism...As Shawn nots above, pinning social problems on religious or scientific creeds can divert from the real problem. It is rare that a religion has explicitly encouraged the killing of heathens, outsiders or foreigners...far more often, it is a firebrand cleric or national leader who has used the fervour of the religious in order to incite hatred.

We must be on guard against these people, and stop dictating what is or is not 'right' for people to believe, which, in my view at least, is what the flexible thinking of a postmodern world view encourages.F

steven_12 said:

Fri, 2007-12-21 15:03

For a long time I had trouble to understand what opendemocracy is about. Now I think I understand.

It's user generated content, but with a twist:

Contributors are presented with a veil of authority
But they don't know anything really
Yet they are apparently in no way constrained by their own lack of factual knowledge

For me it's a relief to realize this.

andrew.copson said:

Sun, 2007-12-23 16:31

What I don't understand is what her pointless and ill-informed attacks against those who criticise religion have to do with the valid point hiding near the end of her article, that we should be concerned about how to revitalise and preserve democracy.

jonn76csp said:

Sun, 2007-12-23 17:48

I think Shawn gives too much credence to the 'Eurabia' theory. Muslims are unlikely to overtake the secular/Christian populations of 'Old Europe' anytime soon. One recent projection for Austria, one of the few countries to collect appropriate data, is that Muslims could make up between 14 and 26 per cent of the population in 2050. Remember that Muslim societies sending emigrants to Europe are experiencing the demographic transition too - Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon already have sub-replacement birth rates (i.e. TFR

steven_12 said:

Sun, 2007-12-23 18:49

Remember that Muslim societies sending emigrants to Europe are experiencing the demographic transition too - Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon already have sub-replacement birth rates

No they don't.

Birth rates for Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Actually, the populations of all of these countries are expanding, expanding, expanding.

cseniornyc said:

Sun, 2007-12-23 23:18

This is a sad misuse of the pages of Open Democracy .Ms Beattie,a radical religious fanatic unleashes a campaign against the very basics of democracy: reason experimentation , hypothesist testing, proof and refutation ,all to be replaced by the blind obedience to "faith" in which religion is based. Th author wants us to return to the tyranny of prescribed thought of the Middle Ages which in themselves were a step back from the freedom of thought that took place many centuries before. In the ancient Roman and Greek times Religion was a fun pastime where a pantheistic world provided amusement by itself: if you went and said Zeus is a jerk and Venus is a slut, most would simply laugh.Now if you referred to god in those terms in the 15 c, the Inquisition would send a squad for you to be dragged and burned at the stakes. Ms Beattie's method of reasoning is fallacious and disingeneous as when she states: "Many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith," and again: "Many members of the scientific community have sought to distance themselves from the self-publicising polemics of Richard Dawkins and his fellow "new atheists", " Here, rather obviously, the author hides her inadequacy behind the misuse of the quantifier "many scientists" as a universal so she doesn't have to specify it and tell us exactly how many. If the she'd bother to count these "scientists" all she'd need is one hand and three fingers. Make no mistake Ms Beattie between a jihadist theologian like you and fine rational mind like Dawkin's ,99.99 % of all scientists would choose Dawkins because religion and science are oxymoronic concepts.

LarryInCincy said:

Mon, 2007-12-24 03:54

It does appear that science has usurped religion's place as - "the explainer of all". At least in many quarters. And those that assert that science is the only valid way to understand our existence do sound some strong, fundamentalist, notes. So it seems there are scientific as well as religious fundamentalists. Great. Now we have 2 camps of absolutists to worry about. Each making claims of what it means to be human. And, yes, science is able to critique itself via the scientific method but the change is entirely within the domain of science. And the domain of science is limited. Science is a tool that can be used for good or ill but it offers no guidance on how it should be used. What to do? Dr. Beattie posed the question, "How do we respond to the slow death of Democracy"? Perhaps there in lies the answer.

raghuvanshiramesh said:

Mon, 2007-12-24 07:16

Western scholars always thinking onesided, there are other point of view also, they never consider that.One thing is very clear, science never explain what is conciousness , never explain mind`s secrete.There are limit to science,from ancient time man is quirious to know secrete of death, what is remain after death, science can never give answer to this question. Science is based on question HOW, but WHY that also biggerest question and man search answer of this WHY in religion.. Science and religion both are essential to mankind. This Iam telling pure religion and pure science. I myself ardently hate fundamentalist religion.Fundamintalist are in all religion. Another point is, why man are killing to each other on name of religion?one reason is economical. When Muslim stoped supply of speces from India, western people started war against Muslim, they gave this war colour of religion. This is one of the weakest point of human nature,you can incite emotion in man`s mind only by faith, religion is based on faith, in that war thousand man killed both side. Today same drama is play on ground of Iraq, Afganishan, Ravanda.so we must understand real cause of killing and manuplating religion and science

ncolloff said:

Mon, 2007-12-24 07:28

I enjoyed your criticism of Tina Beattie's assertion that 'many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith' by offering not a cogent demonstration of scientific method but an even more ungrounded counter-assertion of your own. At least, Ms Beattie offered an example of a scientist who is also a person of faith; and, a simple journey to a bookstore would indicate others (though this is not a statistical survey) Statistical surveys have been done; and, usually show physicists and chemists as more likely believers than biologists and psychologists, which is, itself, an interesting finding in the sociology of knowledge.

jonn76csp said:

Tue, 2007-12-25 12:12

StevenC, it takes several decades after a society's birth rates fall below replacement, for the population to start falling. This is called population momentum. Replacement rate (over the long-term) is about 2.1 children per woman. Turkey is 1.92, Algeria is 1.86, Lebanon is 1.88, Iran is 1.71. The demographic transition appears to be a universal phenomenon. http://oregonstate.edu/~muirp/changtfr.htm

erikjan said:

Tue, 2007-12-25 13:32

The best wat to describe this essay is probably ¨confused¨. It is not at all clear what it is supposed to show. It lacks arguments, is full of confused reasoning and vague allusions and is largely based on framing the the issue around a concept of science as ¨constructed knowledge¨ , a thought system that lives among other equally valid thought systems like religion. References to post-modernism, imperialism and the changes in the meaning of the words religion and science do little more than hide an attempt to portray science and religion as belonging to the same category, as some sort of interchangeable concepts that have equal rights to be considered knowledge. Depicting science as ¨narrowly focused on an objective, rationalist approach to knowledge based on empirical evidence alone¨ while describing religion as ¨the poetic and holistic wisdom of past generations¨ displays a kind of romantic anti-science fluff that only confuses matters and adds nothing at all to the discussion. The suggestion is made that science excludes theology (and philosophy, like these two are on a par) as a legitimate source of knowledge. Reality is that religion is not a valid source of knowledge about the world, It is just an interesting subject for study. To further muddy the waters we are introduced to the ¨scientific fundamentalist¨. This is an interesting concept undefined by the author. Some light is shed on this concept when she states ¨religious extremism is informed by the same ahistorical and literalistic understanding of truth which informs scientific approaches to knowledge, with their shared resistance to ambiguity, doubt and complexity in the quest for meaning ..¨. Science as resistant to ambiguity, doubt and complexity? What a positively weird concept of science. And what an insult to the millions of scientists who are essentially reduced to the equals of religious fundamentalists. This ploy is used again when it is stated that ¨if modernity created the conditions in which religious and scientific fundamentalisms took root, it is postmodernity (... destabilizes all claims to truth ...) which has created the kind of volatile social environment in which these opposing forces encounter one another with potentially explosive violence¨So we are on the brink of a violent encounter between Dawkins, Harris and quite a number of eminent scientists, who, while reciting the holy mantras of science and, ready to give their lives in the name of holy proof and evidence, aim their cruise missiles at praying and exploding religious fundamentalists who have a strong desire to go to heaven and meet the virgins? To strengthen the aversion to knowledge we have to realize that ¨the gulags, Hiroshima and the gas-chambers have cast a pall over western memory and consciousness, and we are right to distrust the forms of knowledge and the political systems in which such violence was able to take root and grow¨. The atom bomb was developed in the US, a democracy. Do we have to distrust democracy? Which forms of knowledge are we to distrust? All science? Or just those parts of science used in warfare? Or not science but only technology (it is good to know but do nothing with that knowledge)? What does she mean with this, and if this distrust is so important, what is the alternative? Religion? Just believe the holy book, and all will be Ok? At various points the author tries to deflect criticism of religion as western imperialism (Islam), anti-catholicism, or just plain fanaticism (Dawkins et al.) The tired argument of Hitler and Stalin being atheists is repeated as if that has anything to do with the discussion. People will always find a way to gain and abuse power, religion is just one more way of doing that, just like Nazism, Capitalism or Communism. Atheism has no bearing on that. When was the last time you heard of atheists killing protestants? Religious fundamentalism is, according to the author, a reaction to a variety of -ism´s like modernism, imperialism and capitalism. And a mirror image of the modern western societies with their consumerism, corruption, lack of values and nothing to die for. She rants about everything that is supposed to be wrong with modern western societies. Most of this is not new, might be true or not, and is, mostly besides the point. All of it has nothing whatsoever to do with the issues that that Dawkins et al. talk about. The author provides no arguments about why religious statements and beliefs should be immune from inquiry about their validity. These beliefs have very real consequences (not only for the people who hold these beliefs, but also for others) but somehow we are not to question them, even if they are patently absurd. Questioning the role religion as the sole provider of morality is equally a belief that has to be questioned in light of the abysmal track record of religion on moral matters. Arguments would be welcome about the poetic and holistic wisdom of (just a few random examples) burning widows together with their husband, executing women for adultery, not operating electrical equipment on Saturdays, not to inoculate your children because if the get ill it´s the will of god, etc. The question is why we should not question these beliefs. People suffer and die because of the consequences of these beliefs and we owe it to them to question these beliefs, and as far as I am concerned, try to change them. IMHO this essay should not have found a place on OpenDemocracy.org. It does not add anything valuable to this discussion, on the contrary, it ignores the blatant anti-democratic tendencies present in a lot of religious movements, the often very aggressive reaction from believers to attempts at an open discussion of religious beliefs and seems to be promoting ignorance and complacency when dealing with the absurdities of religious belief.

brianbarder said:

Tue, 2007-12-25 17:04

Alas, this article contains a mishmash of largely unrelated ideas, some hopelessly misguided, some interesting and stimulating, a few fairly banal and obvious. The emotional attacks on Richard Dawkins, while currently fashionable, are almost entirely off-beam. The implied criticisms of his position are all answered in 'The God Delusion' and Dawkins's other books and articles. Many of the article's propositions about religion, advanced as refutations of his beliefs are in fact adopted by Dawkins as valid and consistent with his critique of the religious position. In order to agree that many non-religious and anti-religious ideologies have caused immense suffering and been responsible for millions of deaths it's quite unnecessary, indeed illogical, to hold that therefore any rejection of religion will have the same negative results.

Moreover, it's nonsense to dismiss Dawkins as 'dogmatic'. The proposition that one should not believe statements which are inherently (or in the light of experience) improbable and for which there is no or inadequate evidence is at the heart of common sense. Dawkins acknowledges that it's possible to conceive of cogent evidence becoming available for the existence of God, and that if this were to happen, he would accept that he had been wrong and change his belief system accordingly. But until such evidence becomes available, he (and millions of sensible people like him) will conduct their lives on the basis that the existence of God is much more unlikely than likely and that as of now there is no convincing reason for believing it, any more than there is a convincing reason for believing in the existence of Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. To call that position dogmatic robs the word of any meaning. Nor is Dawkins either arrogant or indeed humourless: he states his views forcefully and with wit, and if his anticipation of likely criticisms by theists upsets them, he can hardly be pilloried as intolerant or dogmatic as a result.

The sad thing is that by her emotional and poorly argued attack on the Dawkins position on religion, Ms Beattie casts a shadow of scepticism over the things she then goes on to say, although they are logically quite unconnected with it, and deserve to be judged in their own right. Many of her subsequent arguments make useful and valid points. It's just a pity that she starts off by disqualifying herself as a rational and objective analyst by her rant against the secular position which an increasing majority of educated people in the 21st century adopt. It's quite unnecessary, and one would have thought undesirable, to begin a debate by alienating a high proportion of those who are most likely to be impressed by your main arguments.

Brian B

http://www.barder.com/ephems/

dohenyjc said:

Tue, 2007-12-25 17:45

Once again we can see how easily the concept 'religion' can cloud, confuse, and bedevil rational argument. Dump the bloody word - it's a monster! An athiest is somebody who rejects belief in supernatural beings. Athiesm is the first step on the long hard road to rationality; the rational mind is the only problem solving faculty that we humans possess. The countless millennia before the advent of rationality saw the pre-rational mind hold sway over humanity. Humans could do no more than learn survival skills and create myths. Fears and expectations associated with these unseen entities gave rise to rituals, some designed to placate, others intended to reward these capricious beings for favours received. This in a nutshell was pre-rational man's 'reality' - a reality created and elaborated by (sometimes professional) mythmakers. Myths were of two kinds - those intended to entertain, and those which corresponded to 'spin' or political propaganda in our own days. Rulers and priests alike made free use of the latter type of myth in order to keep the tillers of soil and drawers of water firmly in their place. The first type of myth, the entertainment variety, survives today as modern fiction - the pre-rational mind subordinated to rationality. If you ask the modern novelist how he/she sets about the creation of a fictional character, you will get the simple answer - a character is a personified abstraction. Personify greed, blood lust, piety, ambition, life, death - anything you like - and you have created a being that for the rational mind does not exist. That's how pre-rational humans created their spirits, goddesses, gods, monsters. The only difference between the modern rational myth maker is that he/she knows the imaginative creation is just that. The pre-rational mythmaker has no such 'reality sense'. 'Religion' begins with the absent faculty.

dohenyjc said:

Thu, 2007-12-27 17:52

He makes the classic blunder. He shoots his mouth off before he has thought the problem through! He needs to be reminded that scientific method is detached, unemotonal, objective, and the only problem solving faculty that humans possess. Fundamentalism - the emotion-laden, pre-rational, ideological opposite to science - is the carrier of a distorted perception of the world - no matter what ideological or cultural rationalizations it espouses. Fundamentalists always strive to sanitize the world; they kill and maim in the name of a perfect society or state,impatient to create a state of flawless being that the rational scientist recognises to be neither possible nor desirable. A fundamentalist scientist would be a firm believer in, for instance, eugenics, and someone in a perpetual state of denial (like the pope) incapable of admitting to error. (To be in error is to be flawed!) Fortunately, only on the pathological extremes of science will you find the fundamentalist mindset.

srheywood said:

Fri, 2007-12-28 14:30

I've been really disappointed in the New Atheism. It seems to consist of just narrow-minded, randomly abusive "because-I-say-so"-ism, which is what it's supposed to be against.

chris_20 said:

Fri, 2007-12-28 17:06

I am somewhat dismayed at the quite dismissive strong adversarial tone that characterises many of the comments in this thread. In response, let me quote from the American pragmatist philosopher, William James. Writing in the first decade of the last century, he said: "It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat, they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricim which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of affair without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility" (cited in Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation, Polity Press 1991, p.329). Elsewhere James says: "Life is confused and superabundant", and he intimates that more of the the temperament of life is desirable in the practice of philosophy (to which let me add democratic debate), "even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and formal purity" (ibid. p.334). Bernstein cites James in the course of an argument in favour of what he calls "engaged fallibilistic pluralism", characterised by a practice of "dialogical encounter ... [in which] one begins with the assumption that the other has something to say to us and to contribute to our understanding. The initial task is to grasp the other's position in the strongest possible light. One must always attempt to be responsive to what the other is saying and showing" (p.337). No doubt Tina Beattie does not enter into dialogical encounter with Dawkins. It could be interesting to test how far it is possible, or whether it would be possible at all, to sustain dialogue with such an adversarial opponent. If not, then his rhetoric undermines conversation before that conversation can get started. Perhaps this also is the intention of the respondent who judges that Beattie's essay "should not have found a place on OpenDemocracy.org." I on the other hand am sufficiently stimulated by her essay, that I should like to read her book on the subject. I should like to think that OpenDemocracy might be a place where I can than reflect on the book's content, in engaged dialogue with other readers.

sara said:

Sat, 2007-12-29 19:51

Is the writer trying to imply that there is only room to discuss one subject in the world and other discussions are simply distractions?! We in the US so badly need the point of view of atheists, (and all those who are outside of the majority, like feminists, etc.). We need stories, books, films, and discussions by atheists; not in order to confront Islamic fundamentalism, but to prevent a Christian one. It is obvious that we cannot attribute all the problems in the world to religion, but that does not mean that we should drop all discussions about religion and atheism.

OpennessAdvocate said:

Tue, 2008-01-01 15:23

I think that the argument of the article that criticises those forms of postmodernism which claim there is no metanarrative but do not challenge the undemocratic imposition of the metanarrative of consumer capitalism is helpful in a forum called opendemocracy. Unfortunately I do not have the time or knowledge to address all the points raised by the article and related comments. However, from my reading of Popper that is one of the benefits of an open society - distributed expertise. Nonetheless, I would like offer some opinions and for the sake of factual accuracy I will call into question a few assertions that I believe it is important to question in a forum like this.

A number of contributors appear to assume that they have knowledge of an infallible definition of science or democracy. Current academic literature calls such strong assertions in to question. One good place to start with regard to science, that is relevant to the questions raised in the article would be Trigg R (1993) Rationality and Science: Can Science Explain Everything?

It can be argued that there will never be incontestable empirical proof for the existence of God as (at least) mainstream Christianity understands God. This for a number of reasons, perhaps most relevant to the present discussion, if God created humans with freewill importantly including freedom to choose to have faith in God or not, then God is not likely to leave incontestable empirical evidence lying around waiting to be discovered. If that was the 'game' God could just have created robots (or should that be Angels?). Also, if God is omnipresent then it is unlikely that reductive empirical processes can discover God because they cannot take God out of the experiment to produce a control.

I believe that it would be better practice by those who assert that religion is necessarily irrational to read at least some defences by those who are religious and claim reasonableness of religion. A Christian starting point which claims that since St Paul Christianity has been and remains reasonable is 'Faith and Reason' which is easy to find on Google, see: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html . The introduction to A Muslim position can be found at http://www.oneworld-publications.com/books/texts/faith-and-reason-intro.htm with this and a related book being available from that publisher. A Bahá'í statement on religion and science can be found at http://info.bahai.org/article-1-3-2-18.html . I would be interested in other similar arguments by other faith groups.

It is common for many intelligent and open people to misunderstand claims of by the Roman Catholic Church to infallibility in matters of faith and morals. To simplify, the claim is that a council of the Roman Catholic Church or a Pope can speak infallibly on such matters but not everything that a Pope says is infallible. Again simplifying, the only time in which the Church spoke infallibly in the 20th Century was to claim in 1950 that the body of Mary was assumed into heaven, in part as a defence of the human body against the 'calamities' of WWI and WWII. Thus neither the current or last Pope have spoken infallibly, so Popes can change their minds and have pasta rather than pizza for lunch (or should that be wurst rather than schnitzel) without claims for authority by the Church collapsing. For more authoritative but not infallible treatments see http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P2A.HTM paragraphs 888-892 for a fuller explanation of how the Church currently describes it's infallibility, note the discursive democratic flavour of infallibility in paragraph 889. See also http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07790a.htm for a fuller and older (i.e. less P.C.) explanation. The (democratic?) process that led to the infallible definition of Mary as having been assumed into Heaven is described here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-xii_apc_19501101_munificentissimus-deus_en.html

bobynairn said:

Sat, 2008-01-05 18:34

There is, as we must recognise, only the natural world and the human brain is part of it. And so is one of its functions, consciousness, which we can call the mind. Religious belief lives in the mind, only in the mind and it is particular and unique to each mind. The child is not born with religious belief but learns it from the church, sect or cult et cetera. There it prospers in some, stimulated by the imagination. Descarte, a scientist, desperate to find some evidence that God existed, and unable to find Him in the natural world, found him in his thoughts, declared them to be the real world and famously said "I think therefore I am". Others finding the natural world gives them life that is nasty, brutish and short, hope that religious belief will lead them to a happier place after death. There are a thousand and one reasons for belief, which is to hold that something is true for which there is no evidence. That 'something' lives in the mind, and only in the mind, togther with belief. I prefer to live in the natural world, it's all that there is, and might be a limitless expanse of sub atomic energy particles. No gods though, unless you wish to call a particle 'God' !

Cathy Fitzpatrick said:

Sun, 2008-01-06 10:12

I think the article went off course and became emotional and preachy -- like some religions. The author was correct to identify the dogmatism of the "new atheists", and correct to indicate a broad concern for interdependency. But I was hoping she would really lay out an explanation for their aggressiveness in real political terms. Instead, she wound up with a blame-the-West-first diatribe that isn't founded in reason and common sense. Most of the world doesn't live under capitalism. It lives under various forms of near-feudalism, or state communism, or oligarchy, or many other kinds of systems that are nothing like the capitalism of liberal Western societies. And if the people in these states suffer exploitation or environmental degradation, it's first and foremost at the hands of their own governments, not because of some putative voracious imperialist West or "North". This strikes me as a very Western-centric piece. For example, when the author says, "Thus the current phenomenon of religious extremism must be understood in the context of the widespread failure of secularism and the modern nation state in their inability to challenge deprivation and injustice," she can't account for the failure of all kinds of very large states like India, or Brazil, or Saudi Arabia or Russia that indeed do have important religious roots if not state religions, that can't be held up as "secularised and modern" in the way Western states can, and yet suffer deprivation and injustice -- and not due to some sort of excess of liberal democracy. It's China that is rapidly on its way to becoming the major global warmer; it's Russia that is making other countries energy-dependent on its oil and gas. So much for those evil secular Western states, eh? Then, she goes after them with hammer and tong: "Faced with the combined forces of western military and economic power, disenfranchised and alienated groups begin to see the West as the primary source of global injustice and moral corruption." Well, except...how did "the West" create the disenfranchisement in Russia or China or India or Nigeria? The sufferings of the populations have more to do with kleptocratic bureaucracies and misrule than "the West" which in fact is nowhere to be found outside the capitals. Moral corruption is residing alive and well in each one of these types of large barely-modern states -- it can't be blamed on the West, so the West is merely a displaced, surrogate target, because the task of confronting undemocratic states is too hard and too dangerous. I think the trouble with the ferocity of the "new atheists" is really about anger and frustration with their inability to make their own secular humanism a compelling ideology to spread virally to people who seem more easily won over by various fundamentalisms. They aren't able to gain followers, and are in a crisis. Ultimately, I think what religion does give human beings is a sense of the open-endedness and mystery of life which is not all explained by man himself, and not at all constrained by the constraints of humanity. The atheist has to hinge his belief system on the as-yet-unproven doctrine of the improveability of man, a doctrine that has proven as elusive to demonstrate as the doctrine of an eternal God.

egon1lancaster said:

Tue, 2008-01-08 05:03

As world views go, rationalism achieves success when it uses a procedure (deductive or inductive) to explain phenomena. These processes are tools for inquiry and not ideologies. When atheism represents itself as "rationalism" this is mere boast as if associating with "rationalism" it improves its credibility. Reason is in the procedure, not in the worldview. Analysis of a problem does not stop with my interpretation because there are many others. This is what Tina Beattie means by the ambiguity of contemporary thought. I agree with her. Imagine how many interpretations one could reach regarding the emergence of language among "Homo sapiens." So what does it mean to be "rationalistic" about how humans acquired language? The notion of reason must be expanded to include just about any interesting hypothesis. There's no proof which one is right. There are theories and poetries about how things might have been (and still are). What science and religion share is the ability to go forward in rational darkness. There are microscopic and astronomical mysteries that lead to many interesting conclusions. A leap of faith is very reasonable attitude toward the bulk of the unknown.

srheywood said:

Wed, 2008-01-09 18:22

The incoherence of the "new atheism" can be explained as follows. Its central idea is that there is no reasoning or evidence to confirm the "God hypothesis," so you have to reject the hypothesis. Let's assume this is right. (In fact there is no "God hypothesis" except in scientific atheism; God isn't a hypothesis to many believers because they aren't pretending to play their understanding by the rules of objective scientific research, so the whole idea is arguably a straw man, but we'll be generous.) Now take a typical statement by Richard Dawkins - say the opening sentence of "The Selfish Gene:" "Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence." Or the bit in "The God Delusion" (p. 368) where he (not unreasonably) argues that it is wrong for anthropologists to tolerate or excuse Inca human sacrifice, since it was one of many examples of abuses by the religious, such as modern terrorism and so on. If you treat these statement as hypotheses, they fall down just as spectacularly as the God hypothesis. In fact, the "coming of age" one doesn't even get as far as constituting an intelligible hypothesis. What can it possibly mean for intelligent life as a whole to "come of age"? Sure, it's poetic and visionary, but so is John's gospel. Similarly with Inca human sacrifice. Judging by reason and evidence alone, there's grounds for saying it's distasteful to modern sensibilities, or extremely violent, or methodologically fallacious, but there's no basis for saying that it's morally wrong. What's the objective, repeatable, empirical test for moral wrongness? There isn't one. From such examples I conclude that the central "new atheist" polemic hasn't got any firmer basis in objectivity, science, reason or evidence than belief in God. Whatever it is about God that's getting their goat, it clearly isn't his logical, rational or objective fallaciousness, because half the things they themselves say about human sacrifice being wrong and intelligent life "coming of age" don't have any basis in objective reason or evidence either. In fact, religious belief and the "new atheism" (which seems to be about as new as, say, Lucretius) are alike in that they are grounded in a subjective rather than an objective view of reality. Basically, when Dawkins complains about Inca human sacrifice, all he can ever really say, to back up his view that it's wrong, is to testify to his subjective (and basically incommunicable) understanding of its appalling, outrageous wrongness, and hope to evoke a similar sense of outrage in his readers - which won't work unless his readers are already predisposed to agree with him, because if they aren't, he's got nothing to fall back on reason- or evidence-wise at all. Effectively, he's just pointing to Inca sacrifice and saying, "Of course it's wrong," and trusting his readers to say, "Yes, obviously it is." In his own terms, he's just trying to help another meme along on its way by shouting it a bit louder. Which, I suppose, is OK as a way of proceeding, but Dawkins seemingly can't admit that this is the way he's going about it, apparently because this is the same method that the religious rely on when they testify to the existence of God: they just shout about him. The religious (or many of them) have a subjective (and basically incommunicable) understanding of God's existence - religious experience, as it's known. Then they go around saying, "Of course he's there, can't you see it?" because there's little else they can say, and occasionally others, possibly those who are predisposed to such things, say, "Oh yes, I can see it too." The mirror-image of this process comes from the "new atheist" Christopher Hitchens, whose book opens with a personal account of a directly experienced understanding of God's non-existence. He may be right, but either way it's an account of direct subjective experience, and objective science and reason have nothing to do with it. I'm not for the moment commenting on whether either Dawkins or Hitchens or their religious opponents are or aren't deluded in their respective subjective understandings. God may be a delusion. So might the idea that there's anything intrinsically wrong with human sacrifice. In this post I'm not committing myself! What I'm saying is that the same subjective method of understanding and argument is being used by all parties in the debate, but one distinctive thing about the "new atheists" is that they are claiming to use an objective method which they aren't in fact using, except as a stone to throw at the religious in the ongoing war of the glass-house-dwellers. Whether or not there really is a God, that strikes me as self-evidently incoherent. I may, of course, be talking a load of old cahoonies, but if there's a flaw in this argument no-one's pointed it out to me.

spamgreg said:

Fri, 2008-01-11 14:14

Tina Beatty did a good paper here.

There is a big flaw though : Adolph Hitler was not an atheist at all, he was a Christian, and an ancient child of choir at that. Several proofs :
- In his book there is no trace of atheism. In no speech or writing did he reject religion.
- In 1932, just 2 months after he came in power, he signed a "concordate" with the Pope and Protestant heads, giving many rights to the Catholic and Protestant churches of Germany : for example, priests are directly paid by the german State since then.
- The horrible Waffen SS elite troops had written on their belt buckle "Gott mit Uns".
- The Nazis tried to exterminate primarily Jews and Slaves. They placed Slaves just above Jews in their stupid "scale" of "races", and assassinated 20 millions of them. That corresponds to two religions (judaism and orthodoxy), so they had obviously religious motives for their murders.

By the way, all forms of fascism were connected to christianism :
- The Pope Pie 12 did never talk against Hitler nor Mussolini nor general Franco ; Franco was extremely christian, his regime type is called "national-catholic".
- There were Cardinals in several south america juntas supported by the USA.
- All fascisms were seen by the West as the antithesis of communism : christian, capitalist, hierarchical.

xvi10 said:

Fri, 2008-01-11 15:54

When this article brackets Dawkins & Harris, who have never raised a finger to anyone or threatened to so, in the same category as suicide bombers you know that facts and reasonable argument have gone by the board in favour of the sort of rigid idea the author criticises.

GordonHide

wardsten said:

Thu, 2008-01-24 20:24

"If we are to understand this phenomenon and its social and political implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist extremists."

Are these the same Atheist Extremists that take such violent offence at the USA adopting the motto "One Nation Under God" or that in the UK Anglican bishops have seats in the House of Lords that they write books and do lecture tours?
Heaven save us if their become really militant and utilize their comfy chairs...

jim willmot said:

Thu, 2008-02-21 07:24

Her lecture was one long apology for magical thinking and then she quote-mined Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens to paint them as intolerant bigots. Her main point was that religion offers a way to transcend the mundane, to appreciate beauty. No mention of truth, no mention of the atrocities committed in the name of faith. She blamed the holocaust on Hitler's atheism (she called it neo-paganism) which seems totally dishonest since, as a Christian reader, she should know that it was centuries of Jewish hatred, inculcated by Christians (e.g. Martin Luther's Jews and Their Lies), that led to the holocaust, not just the policies of a madman. I would agree with her that most people of faith practice a benign form of comforting, wishful thinking. What she fails to see is that only when people stand up to the powerful myth-making zealots does enlightment and progress occur. She said she knows of Catholics in Africa that do in fact, hand out condoms, therefor one shouldn't criticize the Vatican. Her apologitic behavior seems cowardly to me...a way to get paid by the faith industry for helping them maintain heir hold on morality. The sacred cow is sacred no more Ann...people are finally exposing religion for the fraud that it is since we no longer have to fear burning at the stake, stoning, banning from public office, ostracism, etc. The term "militant atheism' is a way to sell her book...she blasts the Four Horsemen for speaking the truth and then cries that people of faith are being viciously attacked. Not one word did she utter of child rape, arranged marriages, fatwahs, polygamy, etc...just the tired apologies for organizations that make her feel good while listening to a choir. As Voltaire said, "Religion began when the first rogue met the first fool." Beattie is playing both roles, rogue and fool, and wants us all to keep going along with her silly game of religion because it results in more good than bad. As Lennon said, "Just give me some truth."